n "A Dead Man's Diary"--of which Mr. J.M.
Barrie, in reviewing it, said, "The vigour of the book is
great, and the author has such a gift of intensity that upon
many readers it will have mesmeric effect"--has gone through
innumerable editions, in England and in America.

_I.--The Ghost of the Past_

Some years ago I became so seriously ill that I was pronounced dying,
and, finally, dead. Dead to all intents and purposes I remained for two
days, when, to the astonishment of the physicians, I exhibited symptoms
of returning vitality, and in a week was convalescent.

Of the moments preceding my passing I recollect only that there came
over me a strange and sudden sense of loss, as though some life-element
had gone out from me. Of pain there was none, nor any mental anxiety.

I recollect only an ethereal lightness of limb, and a sense of
soul-emancipation and peace, a sense of soul-emancipation such as one
might feel were he to awaken on a sunny summer morning to find that
sorrow and sin were gone from the world for ever, a peace ample and
restful as the hallowed hush and awe of twilight, without the twilight's
tender pain.

Then I seemed to be sinking slowly and steadily through still depths of
sun-steeped, light-filled waters that sang in my ears with a sound like
a sweet, sad sobbing and soaring of music, and through which there swam
up to me, in watered vistas of light, scenes of sunny seas and shining
shores where smiling isles stretched league beyond league afar.

And so life ebbed away, until there came a time when the outward and
deathward-setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt
myself swept shoreward and lifeward again on the inward-setting tide of
that larger life into which I had died.

My next recollection is that the events of my past life were rising
before me. The hands on the dial of time went back a score of years, and
I was a young man of twenty-one, living in chambers off Holborn. One
evening there burst over London a fearful thunderstorm, and hearing a
knock at my door, I opened it, to find a beautiful girl named Dorothy,
the daughter of the housekeeper, standing there. Terrified by the
lightning, and finding herself alone, she begged to be allowed to remain
until her mother's return.

The words had scarcely passed her lips before there came another
blinding flash of lightning, followed almost instantaneously by a
terrific crash of thunder. With a cry of